She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (12 page)

Above all, the key to Stephen’s coup was the solemn ceremony that took place in the incense-clouded cathedral at Winchester on 22 December. A coronation was not merely – or not at all, in Stephen’s case – a pageant for public display; the service at Winchester was a hurried affair in the presence of scarcely any noblemen and only three prelates. Instead, it was a sacramental rite, which changed forever the man at its centre. Stephen entered the cathedral a claimant to the throne; he left it a king. Some might think him a wrongful king, and oppose his rule on those grounds – but they could not deny his kingship, which had taken effect at the moment when the archbishop had touched his head, breast, shoulders and arms with holy oil. At that instant, the interregnum that had begun when Henry took his last breath at Lyons-la-Forêt was ended.

In that instant, too, lay the seeds of civil war. Matilda was the only surviving child of her father’s marriage, who had been named his heir and received oaths of loyalty from his nobles. Stephen, meanwhile, had been anointed and crowned as Henry’s successor. Two distinct forms of royal legitimacy now stood in direct opposition to one another, embodied in two different people. And it was clear that these rival claims could be reconciled only in victory for one, and defeat for the other.

By the spring of 1136, it seemed as though Stephen had already won the fight with a single blow. Matilda, weighed down by her pregnancy at Argentan, her husband entangled in home-grown revolt in Anjou, was an irrelevance. In January, her cousin had stood in her place as chief mourner at her father’s lavish burial.
Later that month, his control of the riches of the royal treasury, combined with his contacts in the fertile recruiting-ground of Flanders, enabled him to mobilise an army of mercenaries with astonishing speed against King David of Scotland, Matilda’s maternal uncle, who had overrun the English frontier from Carlisle to Newcastle as soon as he heard of Stephen’s coup. The menacing size of Stephen’s forces – ‘greater than any in living memory’, according to the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon – rapidly persuaded David to come to terms, and the new king’s success in seeing off the Scots helped to convince the Anglo-Norman nobility that they should rally to Stephen’s standard.

What the country needed, in the words of the
Gesta Stepha
ni
, was ‘a king who, with a view to re-establishing peace for the common benefit, would meet the insurgents of the kingdom in arms and would justly administer the enactments of the laws’. The oath Stephen had sworn at his coronation had promised his new subjects justice; now he had taken up arms against a hostile invasion to imposing effect. There could be no doubt that it was Stephen – not his cousin Matilda, nor his elder brother Thibaud, whose candidacy for the throne had withered in the bud once word of Stephen’s coronation began to spread – who offered the best chance of maintaining ‘peace for the common benefit’ across England and Normandy. Here perception and reality blurred and merged: the more pledges of allegiance the new king secured from among the nobles, the more unhesitatingly he could bring to heel those who resisted him; and the more effectively opposition was crushed, the more magnates would be driven to pledge him their support.

At Easter, the irresistible logic of this virtuous circle was played out when Stephen staged a spectacular gathering of his court, ‘more splendid for its throng and size, for gold, silver, jewels, robes, and every kind of sumptuousness, than any that had ever been held in England’, Henry of Huntingdon reported admiringly. This theatrical demonstration of the magnificence of his kingship and his mastery of the kingdom – now reinforced by a
papal letter approving his coronation and excusing the violation of his oath of loyalty to Matilda – secured the attendance, and with it the service, of all but a small handful of the bishops and nobles of England and Normandy. It was an occasion which combined promise and threat to overwhelming effect, and its glittering success was confirmed by the belated arrival of Robert of Gloucester, Matilda’s illegitimate half-brother, who had so far held himself aloof from Stephen’s nascent regime.

Gloucester was one of the greatest noblemen in the country, powerful, charismatic and intensely proud. He had been at his father’s bedside when he died, and received from him an extraordinary cash legacy of £60,000 from which to distribute wages and rewards to Henry’s troops and household. He might therefore have hoped to be a kingmaker, even if his bastardy meant that he could not be a king, and certainly the idea that he should now be compelled to swear allegiance to a man with whom he had once competed for influence at his father’s court cannot have been easy to swallow. But by the end of April it was clear that the alternative to accepting the new King Stephen was impotent and ultimately dangerous isolation. (‘If he were to resist,’ William of Malmesbury argued on his behalf, ‘it would bring no advantage to his sister or nephews, and would certainly do enormous harm to himself.’) Gloucester’s homage – which was performed in return for confirmation of his title to his lands, and ostentatiously warm demonstrations of royal favour – therefore acknowledged Stephen’s triumph, and, in doing so, made that triumph complete.

Or so it seemed. The winter of 1136 was a bitter one for Matilda. She had played her part in her father’s plans, entering into a distasteful marriage so that she and her sons would be ready to inherit his throne, only to discover that it was the precedent of Henry’s actions rather than the pronouncement of his intentions which determined the identity of his successor. She, who had once presided in majesty over the imperial court, now found herself embattled with her three boys in the frontier fortresses that remained her only foothold in her father’s lands. Perhaps it was
a relief, in personal terms, that her partnership with her unloved husband could now function at a distance, as the political alliance it was, rather than in unwanted intimacy. But, for Matilda, the demands of duty and the exercise of power had always come before sentiment or personal satisfaction. The very concept of private happiness, in fact, can scarcely have made sense to a woman who had left her home as a child of eight to live out a public destiny. Any relief, therefore, at a separation made necessary by their joint campaign to press her claim – with Geoffroi now launching regular raids into Normandy from his base in Anjou – can only have been overshadowed by frustration at their failure to make any meaningful headway.

On the other hand, they were not, at least, being driven back from the Norman frontiers, and that in itself might cause Stephen problems. Normandy had been disintegrating into chaos ever since King Henry’s death. The duchy would always be more difficult to control than England, since it lacked the centralised administration that allowed English government to regulate itself in the king’s absence. It was no accident that Henry had spent more than half of his time on the Norman side of the Channel, and the wisdom of that decision was confirmed once his commanding presence was removed, when disputes between belligerent rival landowners sprang bloodily into life; ‘… stubborn Normandy, an unhappy mother country, suffered wretchedly from her viper brood’, Orderic Vitalis lamented from his cloisters at St Evroult. ‘For on the very same day that the Normans heard that their firm ruler had died … they rushed out hungrily like ravening wolves to plunder and ravage mercilessly.’

Such lawlessness did not in itself help Matilda’s cause, since, if the Norman barons loathed each other, they despised the Angevins more. In one raid lasting only thirteen days, Orderic reported, Geoffroi’s forces ‘made themselves hated forever by their brutality’, burning homes, crops and churches, plundering and slaughtering as they went. And, for as long as the army that fought in her name was led by her husband and recruited in Anjou, Matilda
would struggle to be seen as the daughter of the king of England rather than the wife of the Angevin count. But, at the same time, the first cracks were beginning to appear in the facade of Stephen’s victory; and the longer Normandy was left to implode into violence, the wider those cracks might become.

Question marks were first raised over Stephen’s judgement in the summer of 1136, when he faced the task of extinguishing what should have been the last few embers of resistance in England. A lord named Baldwin de Revières, who had given devoted service to King Henry and his family, refused to recognise Stephen as king and fortified Exeter Castle against him. With characteristic energy and speed, Stephen raced westward to pin Baldwin and his small garrison within the looming walls of the castle, built on the Conqueror’s orders three-quarters of a century earlier. There could have been no better opportunity to display the military muscle that lay behind the theatrical splendour of the Easter Court, and Stephen’s army therefore included not only his formidable Flemish mercenaries but an imposing show of the baronial forces that were now at the king’s command.

As the siege tightened in the stifling heat of an exceptionally hot summer’s sun, the castle’s well ran dry. Its defenders survived for a while by eking out their supplies of wine, but when the wine-barrels too were empty Baldwin was forced to plead for the lives of his followers. The garrison’s desperation was obvious and pitiful. Baldwin’s wife came to Stephen as a supplicant, barefoot, her long hair hanging loose, weeping in grief and fear; and the dreadful effects of dehydration were shockingly evident, according to the
Gesta Stephani
, in her companions’ ‘sagging and wasted skin, the look of torpor on their faces, drained of the normal supply of blood, and their lips drawn back from gaping mouths’. It was a churchman, Stephen’s brother Henry of Winchester, who argued that kingship rather than humanity should dictate his response to their pleas. Baldwin was a rebel and a traitor, and his destruction was not only warranted but necessary to demonstrate the terrible power of Stephen’s rule.

Others within the royal camp, however, led by Earl Robert of Gloucester, pressed for mercy. To the acute eyes of Bishop Henry, it was clear that the earl’s enthusiasm for leniency was closely related to his reluctance to join Stephen in the first place, and that his covert agenda was to undermine rather than reinforce the king’s authority. But, despite Stephen’s instinctive talent for rapid and decisive action, his royal uncle’s ruthlessness did not come so naturally to him. All his life, his easy, unpretentious charm and generous good nature had inspired genuine affection in those around him; but now he was about to discover the disadvantages, to a king, of being loved rather than feared. At Gloucester’s urging, Stephen allowed Baldwin and his garrison to go free. As a result, the very public moral of the siege of Exeter was that resistance to Stephen need be neither futile nor fatal.

It was a lesson reinforced eight months later by the king’s belated attempt to take control of the spreading anarchy in Normandy. Stephen’s regime could not hope to endure without challenge if he failed to establish an unshakeable grip on Normandy as well as England. His most powerful subjects held lands on both sides of the Channel, and they looked to their king to protect their interests on French as well as English soil. But it took Stephen more than a year even to take ship for the Norman coast; and he was still twenty-five miles from the walls of Matilda’s fortress at Argentan when his army suddenly disintegrated. Simmering hostility between Stephen’s Flemish mercenaries and his Norman barons erupted into violence, while the deep mutual suspicion between the king and Robert of Gloucester was laid bare when Gloucester accused Stephen of plotting to ambush and kill him. The king and his closest supporters retreated to England after nine fruitless months, leaving Normandy neither at peace nor protected from Angevin assault, with Gloucester now ensconced in his Norman power base around Caen and Bayeux. Seven months after that, in June 1138, the disaffected earl publicly renounced his allegiance to Stephen, and declared for his sister Matilda.

Gloucester’s decision to set himself up as his sister’s champion
transformed Matilda’s position beyond recognition. Until the summer of 1138, hers had been a lost cause, supported only by the forces of her Angevin husband, who was a hated outsider in Normandy, while England itself remained completely beyond her reach. Now, at a stroke, the support of her half-brother gave her a foothold, and potentially an army, at the heart of her cousin’s kingdom. And Stephen’s regime – which had once seemed, in the absence of any viable opposition, so tightly woven as to be unassailable – began to fray so badly that it was possible for the first time to imagine it unravelling altogether.

Initially, it appeared that the king might be doing enough to contain the damage. In Normandy, the joint forces of Earl Robert and Count Geoffroi were held off by Count Waleran of Meulan, the elder of two noble brothers, the Beaumont twins, who were fast becoming Stephen’s right-hand men. Meanwhile, Stephen himself sped through England at the head of his troops, seizing castles and territory that belonged to Gloucester and his followers. Once again, he failed to press home a siege, this time at Bristol, where Gloucester’s supporters were holed up within the earl’s massive fortress, a bastion built of creamy-pale limestone quarried from his lands near Caen. But, if the king’s decision to turn away from this daunting stronghold in favour of softer targets gave renewed suggestions of an unwillingness to strike the killer blow, that hardly seemed to matter once the men of Yorkshire had rallied at Northallerton around the standard of their archbishop to defend the kingdom against Matilda’s uncle David of Scotland, whose forces had overrun the north once more in the spring and summer of 1138. Mustered around a ship’s mast hung with the banners of the patron saints of the great Yorkshire cathedrals, St Peter of York, St John of Beverley and St Wilfred of Ripon, topped with a gleaming silver pyx containing the consecrated host, the English army routed the Scots in less than two hours.

It was a terrible and bloody triumph, with thousands of Scots cut down by English arrows that ‘buzzed like bees and flew like rain’. And it was a wounding blow for Matilda, given that her cause
in England, as in Normandy, was now identified with an invading enemy beaten back by forces loyal to King Stephen. There could be no mistaking, if there had been any doubt before, that Matilda herself would have to stand at the centre of the campaign to secure her inheritance. She needed her husband for the sons he had given her and for the troops he now led, and her half-brother as an Anglo-Norman magnate who could take her fight into the heart of Stephen’s kingdom. But the legitimacy of her cause depended on Matilda alone. Her uniquely royal blood – despite the female body in which it was housed – represented the only hope of challenging the sanctity of Stephen’s coronation.